[him] with new eyes, and a distance, a suspiciousness came between [them] ” : “ If I
had thought anything in writing the story, I had thought that perhaps it would make
me more acceptable to them, and now it was cutting me off from them more com-
pletely than ever ” (159 – 60). Literacy may change the look of the world, but it simul-
taneously entails one ’ s increasing alienation.
“ Bright and Morning Star ” provides an early example of Wright ’ s delineation of
the promise and danger of competing perspectives. The story tracks the shifts in the
perception of its black female protagonist, Aunt Sue, as, moving from Christianity to
communism, she is betrayed by all available perspectives, fi gured as “ faiths. ” While
critics have often pegged the story as young Wright ’ s made - to - order propaganda for
the American Communist Party (Fabre, Unfi nished 163), the development of its pro-
tagonist does not culminate in her adoption of a worldview that would be identifi able
with any organized political movement.
Sue is a mother whose two sons, Johnny - Boy and Sug, have joined the working -
class activists in their fi ght against the town ’ s oppressive law enforcement regime.
The story follows the mutations of her search for sense - making techniques that would
allow her to survive from day to day. Her initial perspective is that of Christian faith.
Christianity “ had focused her feelings upon an imagery which had swept her life into
a wondrous vision ” ( “ Bright ” 224), allowing her to bear the daily poverty and oppres-
sion under structural racism. As her sons become politically active, she initially tries
to “ fi ll their eyes with her vision, but they would have none of it. ” Instead, “ they
began to boast of the strength shed by a new and terrible vision ” (225), eventually
convincing their mother of their cause.
While Sue organizes her world around the perspective of class consciousness, she
also retains a distance from it. When a traitor seems to have infi ltrated the ranks of
the communists, she is certain that it cannot be any of the town ’ s black folk, whom
she has known all her life. Instead, she warns her son against the recently recruited
white comrades. Unlike his mother, Johnny - Boy, with his unwavering loyalty to the
Party, sees the world exclusively through the prism of class differences: “ ‘ Ah cant see
white an Ah cant see black, ’ ” he tells Sue. “ ‘ … Ah sees rich men n Ah sees po men ’ ”
(234). His is the “ dramatic Marxist vision ” that Wright in 1937 considers the black
artist ’ s most productive means of constructing “ a meaningful picture of the world
today ” ( “ Blueprint ” 44). Yet, his example simultaneously suggests the necessity for
complicating this image. As Wright notes in “ Blueprint ” – anticipating what were
to become his increasing doubts about communist dogma – “ Marxism is but the
starting point ” (44).
Sue, too, realizes the blind spots in the Red perspective when she observes the
impairing of her son
’
s vision:
“
he believes so hard hes blind
”
(233). Indeed, his
unyielding class loyalty betrays the young black man: the traitor is, as Sue intuits,
Richard
Wright
319
one of the new white recruits. Johnny - Boy ’ s failure is that of “ stand[ing] too far away
and … neglect[ing] … important things ” ( “ Blueprint ” 45), for example the kind of
local knowledge that informs his mother ’ s convictions about the town ’ s black resi-
dents. Perspective may be a necessary tool for the black subject to move in the world;
yet one must be wary of the traps inherent in perhaps all extant positions.
Communism offered an epistemological principle through which numerous early -
twentieth
-
century black thinkers, artists, and activists organized their world (see
Foner and Shapiro, American Communism ). Yet, Wright prioritizes reading and writing
as enabling the black subject ’ s negotiation of the rigidities of Southern Jim Crow or
the more subtle racism of the North. In a coda added to the truncated 1945 edition
of Black Boy , he looks back at his struggle for a way out of the South of strictly cir-
cumscribed possibilities: “ It had been my accidental reading of fi ction and literary
criticism that had evoked in me vague glimpses of life ’ s possibilities ” (879; emphasis
added). The changes in the perspectives of Wright ’ s other protagonists, too, are more
often than not accidental. Glimpses of different worlds, of unknown possibilities,
come about as calamities whose consequences the person is often unable to bear. The
most famous example of this is Bigger Thomas, who experiences a radical shift in
perspective when he accidentally kills Mary Dalton, the daughter of his new employ-
ers. Surprised by her blind mother as he is laying the passed out girl to bed, Bigger
pushes a pillow onto Mary ’ s face to keep her from stirring. Although her mother
initially appears to him as a “ white blur, ” immediately after Mary ’ s death – even
before Bigger consciously realizes that he has suffocated her – the woman comes clearly
into view: “ Then suddenly her fi ngernails did not bite into his wrists. Mary ’ s fi ngers
loosened. … Her body was still. … He could see Mrs. Dalton plainly now ” ( Native
Son 74). This revelatory moment is repeated in Bigger ’ s subsequent realization of his
having gained a unique view of the surrounding reality: “ if he could see while others
were blind then he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it ” (91). At
stake is nothing less than the reinvention of reality: as the result of this dislocation,
he “ had created a new world for himself ” (205).
The protagonist of “ The Man Who Was Almost a Man ” is similarly thrust out of
his circumscribed place as a young black man through an unintentional killing. As
Edward Margolies notes (87), Bigger ’ s eye - opening manslaughter is echoed in Dave
Saunders ’ shooting accident that kills the mule of his white employer. Trying to prove
his “ manhood ” to himself, the protagonist acquires a used gun. His blindly bumbling
actions – the gun goes off when he “ shut[s] his eyes and tighten[s] his forefi nger ”
(19) – precipitate an unexpected chain of events. As a consequence of the shooting,
the publicly embarrassed Dave has to agree to compensate for the dead animal by
having his wages garnered for the next two years. To escape his humiliation, he decides
on a whim to jump a passing train. The story ends with a glimpse of an unactualized
future as Dave ’ s gaze follows the railroad tracks that bear him away from the town:
“ Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to some-
where, somewhere where he could be a man … . ” (26; ellipsis in original). The train
and the tracks here repeat their customary role in African American representations
320
Mikko Tuhkanen
as the “ promise of unrestrained mobility and unlimited freedom ” (Baker 236). Wright
arguably alludes to this tradition also in The Outsider (1953), where
Cross Damon
discovers his own private Underground Railroad: he manages an escape from his old
life as the result of a subway accident where a stranger ’ s dead body is mistaken for
his. As with Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon, the incident in “ The Man Who Was
Almost a Man ” opens the black man ’ s eyes to a world of possibilities; we do not follow
Dave far enough to see if his accidental release leads to a future different from Bigger ’ s
or Cross ’ s bleak fates.
Bigger
’
s and Dave
’
s perspectives are perhaps synthesized in the fi gure of Fred
Daniels, the protagonist of “ The Man Who Lived Underground. ” The short story
describes Daniels ’ s escape from the police, who hunt him for an unnamed crime.
Fleeing the law, Fred slips down a manhole into the city sewers. The underground
tunnels provide him an unexpected vantage point from which to watch, undetected,
everyday life in the city: he spies people in a church, a mortuary, a cinema, an offi ce.
He occupies the position of a hidden observer in which Bigger, too, discovers himself
after Mary ’ s murder, and particularly as he hides himself in the derelict buildings of
the Black Belt.
In fi guring the dank recesses of the city sewers as a site of revelation, Wright
follows the tradition of black (male) writing from Jean Toomer and Claude McKay
to Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka, for whom, as Melvin Dixon shows, the under-
ground functions as a recurring trope of insight and self - creation. The “ lower fre-
quencies ” (Ellison 572) of the underground attune Fred Daniels to the knowledge
of everyone ’ s existential guilt, and he resurfaces burdened with an urgent message
for the world. His frustrated attempts to convey his message echo existentialist
arguments about humankind ’ s unconquerable isolation and alienation, one ’ s peren-
nial inability to be understood and recognized by the other. Fred ’ s dilemma exem-
plifi es the incommunicability of experiences across the gulf of perspectives: “ The
distance between what he felt and what these men meant was vast ” (80). This is the
“ psychological distance ” that, in his later work, Wright fi nds operative in the condi-
tion of (post)coloniality ( White 6).
Fred ’ s surreal experience of disjointedness also repeats the double - conscious sub-
ject ’ s isolation by the Veil of race prejudice and segregation that Du Bois exemplifi es
throughout his work. In Dusk of Dawn (1940), Du Bois draws his own allegory of the
cave, whose protagonist resembles Fred Daniels. Much like Fred, the man in Du Bois ’ s
vignette is granted a unique spectatorial slant: he looks at the world from “ a dark
cave, ” a position of isolation and distance. Convinced that his insight must be medi-
ated to others, he – again like Fred Daniels – tries to draw the attention of the passers -
by,
“
speak[ing] courteously and persuasively,
”
only to be met with bemused and
uncomprehending stares. He shares his situation with other black men, all separated
from the world by a barrier that, in his earlier work, Du Bois calls the Veil. Failing
to get a hearing, it dawns on the men “ that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly
tangible plate glass is between them and the world. ” With their continued failure of
communication, some “ may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers. … They
Richard
Wright
321
may even, here and there, break through in blood and disfi gurement, and fi nd them-
selves faced by a horrifi ed, implacable, and quite overwhelming mob of people fright-
ened for their own very existence
”
(130
–
1). This anecdote illustrates Du Bois
’
s
experiences as a politically motivated scholar of culture. Like the scholar who seeks,
and fails, to convince his audience of the absurdity of race prejudice in objective terms,
Fred, reemerging from the underground, tries to inform others of what he has seen,
only to be met with dismissive, frightened, and puzzled reactions. He is fi nally killed
in cold blood by Lawson, one of the detectives assigned to his case. As a representative
of the law, “ law ’ s son ” realizes the incompatibility of Fred ’ s insight and the function-
ing of the law in its extant arrangement above ground. As he says, “ ‘ You ’ ve got to
shoot this kind. They ’ d wreck things ’ ” (92).
The underground perspective is thematized also in
“
The Man Who Went to
Chicago, ” a fragment of “ The Horror and the Glory, ” the second section of Wright ’ s
autobiography, published posthumously as American Hunger (1977 ). The story culmi-
nates in a description of its protagonist ’ s job in a research hospital where he and other
black workers carry out their menial tasks in the institution ’ s basement: “ we occupied
an underworld position, remembering that we must restrict ourselves – when not
engaged upon some task – to the basement corridors, so that we would not mingle
with white nurses, doctors, and visitors ” (237). As in his autobiography in general,
Wright attributes to his narrator a curiosity about the world(s) beyond the Veil to
which other black characters remain insensitive. 3 Restless in his position, the narrator
keenly follows the research procedures carried out by the white staff. In this, he is
unlike his co - workers, who don ’ t see the point of “ looking at the world of another
race ” (239): “ They were conditioned to their racial ‘ place, ’ had learned to see only a
part of the whites and the white world; and the whites, too, had learned to see only
a part of the lives of the blacks and their world ” (243).
Here, as elsewhere, Wright delights in depicting the irrational outcomes of encoun-
ters across incompatible epistemological positions, such as the ones inhabited by the
white researchers and the black underlings. This is the drama – whether tragedy or
comedy – of the color line, where black and white meet as strangers, unable or unwill-
ing to share each other ’ s perspectives. The autobiographical tale develops into a surreal
farce as two of the hospital ’ s black workers, irked by years of animosity, get into a
fi ght, pushing over cages of rats, mice, rabbits, and guinea pigs. After the scuffl e, the
men scramble to save their jobs by restoring a semblance of order. Based on guesswork
and desperation, they devise a system according to which they return the animals in
their cages:
We broke the rabbits down into two general groups; those that had fur on their bellies
and those that did not. We knew that all those rabbits that had shaven bellies – our
scientifi c knowledge adequately covered this point because it was our job to shave
the rabbits – were undergoing the Aschheim - Zondek tests. But in what pen did a
given rabbit belong to? We did not know. I solved the problem very simply. I counted
the shaven rabbits; they numbered seventeen. I counted the pens labeled
322
Mikko Tuhkanen
“ Aschheim - Zondek, ” then procee
ded to drop a shaven rabbit into each pen at random.
And again we were numerically successful. At least white America had taught us how
to count. … (248; ellipsis in original)
The men are relieved to fi nd that none of the researchers, as they return to work and
handle the animals, suspect anything. Yet, the narrator is left wondering: “ Was some
scientifi c hypothesis, well on its way to validation and ultimate public use, discarded
because of unexpected fi ndings on that cold winter day? Was some tested principle
given a new and strange refi nement because of fresh, remarkable evidence? Did some
brooding research worker … get a wild, if brief, glimpse of a new scientifi c truth? ”
(250). That the non - communication between the two worlds scrambles what is sup-
posed to be the rational practice of science is one of Wright ’ s indictments of racialized
perspectives. For Wright, the convolutions of everyday racial choreographies – the
ethics of living Jim Crow, whether in the South or the North – jeopardize the rational
Weltanschauung, whose importance he, a student of Husserl, never relinquished.
If such miscommunications give way to comedy in
“
The Man Who Went to
Chicago, ” 4
elsewhere they lead to violence and tragedy, as in the case of Bigger
Thomas, Fred Daniels, and Saul Saunders, the protagonist of “ The Man Who Killed
a Shadow. ” Saunders murders a white librarian who, acting out some sexualized race
fantasies of her own, crudely attempts to come on to the black man. The white
woman
’
s sexualization of black masculinity and the black man
’
s terror of white
women, and their miserable consequences, are pathologies bred by the ideologies of
white supremacy. The impossibility of communication between the worlds of black-
ness and whiteness leads to tragedy here as it does in Native Son . The distance between
the two actors ’ perspectives allows the kind of dehumanization of the other that made
possible the blind violence of lynching practices. 5 Saul ’ s perspective onto the white
world is such that, engulfed in fear like Bigger ’ s, he is unable to relate to the suffer-
ing of the woman whom he brutally beats to death: “ It never occurred to him that
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 70
